How to run a python script with options

Question

I'm looking for an efficient way to write a python script that can be called using the hyphen-single-letter-space-parameter convention (e.g. python script.py -f /filename -t type -n 27, where f, t, and n are the single letters corresponding to option types and /filename, type, and 27 are their values). I am aware of the sys library and its sys.argv function as a means of grabbing the space-delimited strings following the call (see call program with arguments), but is there a sophisticated way to process these strings when they follow the convention mentioned above?

Answer 1

You want the argparse module in the python standard library.

The argparse module contains an ArgumentParser class which you can use to parse the arguments provided by sys.argv

Usage example:

import argparse
import sys

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description="Does some awesome things.")
parser.add_argument('message', type=str, help="pass a message into the script")

if __name__ == '__main__':
    args = parser.parse_args(sys.argv[1:])
    print args.message

For more details, such as how to incorporate optional, default, and multiple arguments, see the documentation.